The hunt must go on
OPENING meets are taking place across the country and the hunting community is breathing again after a motion to ban legal trail-hunting on National Trust land was defeated by just 299 votes. Despite all the propaganda, including protests outside the AGM in Swindon, members appeared overwhelmingly disinterested: some 62,000 votes were cast, representing less than 2% of the membership of nearly five million (see Agromenes, page 37).
Even fewer bothered to vote on the motion to halt the A303 tunnel past Stonehenge and this was also defeated, on the trustees’ recommendation, by 30,013 to 21,903 votes.
The Labour peeress Baroness Mallalieu, president of the Countryside Alliance, said the Trust had ‘been dragged into a fight it would rather have avoided’. She suggested that, by adopting consistent policies in line with donors’ wishes and landmanagement policy, ‘the pro- and anti-badger cullers, the anti-hunt lobby, the vegan anti-livestock farmers and the Countryside Alliance could argue out their issues without the Trust being diverted from its proper job’.
However, the 67 hunts affected have yet to agree on the Trust’s new licensing conditions. These prohibit the use of animal-scent-based trails, which hunts say is not practicable, and require details of meets and routes to be published online at the risk of attracting saboteur activity, something surely nobody wants. KG